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<\/a>The polar bear patrol practices chasing a faux bear away. Photo by Elisabeth Kruger\/WWF US<\/p><\/div>\n
Wales, home to roughly 150 people, sits on the westernmost point of mainland North America, just 80-odd kilometers from Siberia\u2019s Chukchi Peninsula. (It is one of a handful of places in Alaska where you can, in fact, see Russia from your house.) Polar bear season in the village usually lasts from December to May. The timing is variable and dependent on ice conditions since most of the bears arrive by crossing the frozen ocean from their dens on the Russian side. Those that venture into town have generally wandered in along the beach. Because the main road through town tends to fill in with tall, impassable snowdrifts, the windswept beach is also a route that the village kids take to and from school. A few years back, two of the community\u2019s teachers had a close encounter on their way to work in the winter darkness, and for the Kingikmiut, the ultimate nightmare scenario is a confrontation between a polar bear and their children. At the same time, the traditional solution to bears in the village\u2014shooting them\u2014no longer seems ideal.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in Alaska and Russia, patrols have been launched, as Elisabeth Kruger of the WWF puts it, only after \u201csomething bad happens.\u201d Kruger is the organization\u2019s Anchorage-based senior program officer and much of her work across Alaska\u2019s vast northwest is focused on polar bears. On the Chukchi Sea, where one of the healthiest polar bear populations is located, she and the Kingikmiut wanted to be more proactive for the sake of the bears and the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want my grandchildren to see a polar bear,\u201d says Clyde Oxereok, a village leader and one of the founding members of the patrol. \u201cJust to see a bear in its natural habitat, I think everyone should see that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oxereok, 58, is one of a half-dozen men who volunteer their time for the patrol. \u201cI was fortunate enough to learn from the elders at a young age,\u201d he says. A Wales lifer, he\u2019s hunted bearded seals, the village\u2019s dietary mainstay, as well as walruses and muskoxen. He has also taken three polar bears during his lifetime, and chosen to let many others go safely on their way. He was taught that the bears present themselves to the hunter, and then it\u2019s up to each man whether or not he pulls the trigger.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Illustration by Mark Garrison<\/p><\/div>\n
He first met Kruger through Alaska\u2019s Nanuuq Commission, a polar bear management and conservation organization for Alaska\u2019s native villages. In 2014, Kruger was gauging the support for the possibility of a new patrol program in eight Arctic communities. Oxereok, representing Wales, was most keen.<\/p>\n
The program got off the ground in the late winter of 2016, as bear season was winding down for the year. Kruger and a representative from the US Fish and Wildlife Service traveled to Wales to meet with the team members for training and planning. The patrollers\u2014Oxereok, his brother Stanley, two of their nephews, and two other young men\u2014acquired their gear: a snowmobile and toboggan, safety supplies, and an armory of bear deterrents. They hashed out goals, roles, and principles, and the new program began to take shape. Now underway, their aim is to make regular sweeps of the village at peak times during bear season: primarily before school, and sometimes after school and in the late evening, when public hours end at the school gym. They are also on call to respond to bear sightings reported by residents.<\/p>\n
The patrol team wants to ensure that its efforts to discourage bears from the village neither aid nor interfere with the work of subsistence hunters, who don\u2019t want to see the bears hazed out of the region entirely. \u201cWe are reactive to the bears, not proactive,\u201d says Oxereok. \u201cEven though we\u2019re native subsistence hunters, when we\u2019re on duty we have to remain neutral.\u201d<\/p>\n
Polar bears, of course, have become a potent symbol of the cost of climate change. Al Gore\u2019s An Inconvenient Truth<\/em> seared the image of a polar bear paddling, paddling, paddling hopelessly in search of the vanished Arctic pack ice into minds around the world. But overall, the bears aren\u2019t yet on the brink. After outsiders seeking trophies drove overhunting in the 1950s and 1960s, a 1973 treaty, the Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, was signed by all five countries in which the bears are found: the United States, Canada, Norway, Russia (USSR at the time), and Denmark (via its relationship with Greenland). The agreement significantly limited polar bear hunting and led to a rebound. A 2017 report from the Polar Bear Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature indicates that only one of the world\u2019s 19 regional polar bear populations is definitely declining. Two are increasing, seven are stable, and the remainder lack sufficient data for a conclusive diagnosis.<\/p>\n